Changeworksblog.com

the chart widely used wrongly!

’93% of communication is non-verbal’.  How many times have you heard that one quoted on communication courses or by well dressed consultants? In the original researchers own words “Whenever I hear this misquote, I cringe!”

I said a silent ‘hoorah’ to myself yesterday when I heard Albert Mehrabian interviewed on Radio 4′s ‘More or Less’.  For every communication and many NLP courses that I have been on, the trainer has quoted that old ’93% of communication is non-verbal’ blarney. I have been telling everyone not to believe this for sometime now.  Of course, effective communication involves far more that just words – specifically tone of voice, pitch and quality of voice, facial expressions and other non-verbal language are critical in being understood.

But next time you are told that the words that you say only communicate 7% of the message that is understood, you now know that (officially) this is a misrepresentation of the original work and simply untrue.  Common sense tells us that this is not true: how can you possibly expect to instruct someone about how to bake a cake through non verbal communication? But we love to quote simple summaries of complex research and this asinine conclusion is exactly how our brains take a more complex and meaningful ‘deep structure’ and translate it into a ‘surface structure’ that is, at a best, a partial truth.

So, as we know in this deep to surface structure translation, there are deletions, generalisations and distortions: so what has been deleted in this study.  Well Albert Mehrabian’s study was purely done on single word communications to test the effective communication on positive, neutral or negative feelings.  For example, the speakers would say positive, neutral or negative words with a mixture of positive, neutral or negative tonalities and facial expressions. In this way, the study revealed that it was the vocal element (tonality etc) and the facial expressions that people believed (when it comes to communicating feelings), even if the words spoken completely contradicted the feeling expressed through vocal or facial expression. 

 So, let’s take the lesson from 41 years of believing half-truths: sometimes the complex cannot or should not be summarised into simple numbers and a memorable construct or we miss important learnings. 

Listen again to Prof Mehrabian on Radio 4 tomorrow at 8pm or on BBC iPlayer.